In time, there might be a good moment to put the White Sox’s 3-4 season-opening, West Coast road trip into some larger perspective. Wednesday’s 8-4 loss against an eminently beatable Seattle Mariners team was grotesque to all who tuned in, but it didn’t end the White Sox’s season. Maybe general manager Rick Hahn will put the right kind of 30,000-foot view on it before Thursday’s home opener.
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But this is the game the White Sox played on Wednesday. It was their sole focus, and they screwed it up. A 4-1 run lead against a Mariners offense that had been punchless for the majority of this week was obliterated in a slow-motion crash of a seven-run Seattle sixth.
“We were in an excellent position going into the sixth inning,” manager Tony La Russa said. “The best way to explain it is I did a really lousy job managing that inning. It really hurt our chances to win.”
La Russa was disinclined to elaborate at first, once again defending his team’s defense after an Adam Eaton throwing error exacerbated the jam in the sixth and served to end Dallas Keuchel’s unlikely bid for a quality start. But La Russa later conceded that the main thrust of the issue was allowing reliever Matt Foster, in what wound up being his second straight game-deciding outing, to stay on the mound for 34 pitches as Mariners hitters spoiled his high fastballs, poked their barrels at fading change-ups and methodically tagged him for five runs on five hits.
Between Wednesday’s nightmare and the surrendering of a walk-off blast to Jared Walsh on Sunday night, Foster has allowed as many earned runs (seven) as he did in 28 1/3 innings in his outstanding rookie year.
High-priced closer Liam Hendriks, left in the bullpen on Sunday and relegated to mop-up duty Wednesday after the game was out of reach, has made half as many appearances as Foster.
“He faced too many hitters,” said La Russa of Foster, who was eventually replaced by José Ruiz after the critical blows had landed. “That’s lousy managing. You saw what he did that one day. Pushed him too far. Stupid, lousy, no excuse.”
Foster struck out the side in a scoreless fifth in the team’s only win in Anaheim. He blew a fastball by Mike Trout for a strikeout even before Walsh’s fatal blast on Sunday, and he’s been hitting 95 mph more regularly than he did last year, when his sterling performance earned him a spot and trust to be a high-leverage reliever. With the flashes that Foster has shown, even as his ERA will be 27.00 by the first pitch of Thursday’s opener, La Russa boiled down the issue to his usage and management.
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“We were really set up to pitch the last four innings of the game. We had all those innings covered,” La Russa said. “I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, and we paid the price with all those extra runs. I don’t enjoy saying it, but I enjoy it less not taking responsibility.”
La Russa’s bid to center the blame on himself is a tidy way to compile concerns about the White Sox’s rickety start, and it will probably work because Hall of Fame managers saying they did a lousy job is not an everyday occurrence. La Russa also hasn’t had a starting pitcher last six innings yet, and it’s not because he pulled anyone that was rolling with efficiency. He believes the talent of the defense will win out, but the White Sox’s seven errors brought them tied for the highest total in baseball by the final out in Seattle.
Ultimately, it was Foster himself whose four-seamers at the top of the zone could not miss bats and end the sixth.
“I’m pretty disappointed in myself,” said Keuchel, who was decidedly downcast despite being three outs from a quality start at one point. “Just the inefficiency. I mean, they only had two hard-hit balls the whole game, and both were from (Kyle) Seager, a lefty. Throughout my career, I’ve handled lefties very well. That’s just one of the many things that I was very disappointed in myself in kind of the overall last half of the game. We’ll just leave it at that.”
Looking back at spring training positivity, and dunking on it once the difficulty of the season arrives, is an easy way to look smart. But the stated reason for all the harmony at Camelback Ranch was that La Russa was trusting a talented and veteran clubhouse to run itself and that the players would trust him to fill out the lineup, make pitching changes and put them in a position to succeed. So far, the talented team is error-ridden, the starters are struggling with inefficiency (a factor even in Carlos Rodón’s otherwise brilliant debut) and even reigning American League MVP José Abreu was killing a would-be seventh-inning rally by getting doubled off second base after a Luis Robert lineout.
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Meanwhile, La Russa is literally the first to say that his side of the equation is not going well either.
“If you watch the game, just, I did a lousy job,” La Russa said.
Even if the White Sox are dominant this year, which is still very much in their capability, La Russa will clear 2,400 career losses by the time this season is done. He has been here before and flagellated himself for his moves after losses before. For him, beating himself up is more of a cathartic stage of the process than a crisis about whether he can still manage. At all other opportunities to reflect on his return to the dugout after a decade, La Russa has remarked on how similar managing feels and how it has not driven him to question his decisions. So he doesn’t view the next step here as a mystery.
“It’s easy. You learn,” La Russa said. “Sometimes you learn more from issues than from things that work. Like I said, as the inning was getting along, it was obvious. Part of what you do is take responsibility, that’s what I’m doing. I’m not going to take it into tomorrow. Worst thing you can do is cost your club a chance to lose twice.”
But this is a White Sox season that is still expected to be a tough fight with Minnesota for AL Central supremacy. Two leads handed to the bullpen in Anaheim, and pretty much any game lost to a Mariners team that was both banged up and not as strong as it will be, could carry meaningful consequences. That’s true, even if panic or broad conclusions after a road trip that actually went better than most of the White Sox’s West Coast road swings (19-38 versus the AL West on the road since 2017) don’t feel appropriate.
“Sometimes I see too much potential in this team every day, and when we don’t win, it’s a disappointment,” Keuchel said. “Because I know that we’re capable of winning each and every game. So that’s first and foremost, but there’s a couple of other things that we just need to clean up that aren’t that big. But (if) you let it fester, it’ll be bigger than it is.”
Maybe then, it’s not necessary to wait until another day to put this White Sox road trip in perspective.
“Well, we didn’t completely blow it,” Keuchel said.
(Photo of Tony La Russa, Yasmani Grandal, Dallas Keuchel and José Abreu: Joe Nicholson / USA Today)